The appearance of the six men who have just tumbled into the arena is not merely strange, it is positively disgusting.  They are covered with white paint, and with the exception of tattered breech-clouts are absolutely naked.  Their mouths and eyes are encircled with black rings; their hair is gathered in knots upon the tops of their heads, from which rise bunches of corn husks; a string of deer-hoofs dangles from each wrist; fragments of fossil wood hang from the loins; and to the knees are fastened tortoise-shells.  Nothing is worn with a view to ornament.  These seeming monstrosities, frightful in their ugliness, move about quite nimbly, and are boldly impudent to a degree approaching sublimity.  Notwithstanding their uncouth figures and mountebank tricks their movements at times are undoubtedly graceful, and they appear to exercise a certain authority over the entire pageant.

White is the symbolic paint of the Koshare; hence all the actors who have performed their several parts, including the coarse jesters, make up and represent the society of the Delight Makers, whose office it is to open the ayash tyucotz.  The association whose name has been selected as the title of our story is now before us fully represented, arrayed in its appropriate dress and engaged in the discharge of some of its official duties.  The clowns, too, the most agile and sprightly, in a word the most amusing of the company, are only an exaggeration of the rest, whose joint task it is to diffuse mirth, joy, buoyancy, delight, throughout the whole tribe.  The jesters are also the heralds and marshals of the celebration.  They gather together in the centre of the court and carry on a boisterous conversation accompanied with extravagant gestures.  No one interrupts their noisy garrulity, but the entire assemblage listens eagerly, hailing their clumsy attempts at a joke and their coarse sallies of wit with shrieks of laughter.  Their jests are necessarily of the coarsest; nevertheless excellent local hits are made and satiric personalities of considerable pungency are not infrequently indulged in.  One of the clowns has tumbled down; he lies on his back, feet in the air; another takes hold of his legs and drags him around in the dust.  The peals of laughter that greet this effort give testimony to the estimation in which it is held by the lookers-on.  If one of the spectators has the misfortune to display immoderate enthusiasm, forthwith he is made the target of merciless jeering.  One of the merrymakers goes up to him and mimics his manner and actions in the crudest possible way.  The people on the terraced roofs exhibit their joy by showering down corn-cakes from their perches, which the performers greedily devour.  These things are delightful according to Indian notions, and are well fitted to show how much of a child he still is,—­a child however, it must be remembered, endowed with the physical strength, passions, and appetites of adult mankind.